


A Thousand Teeth, Yours Among Them

by pipistrelle



Series: The People's Tomb Discord Fic Jam 2020 [2]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Trauma, Discord: The People's Tomb (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Everyone lives, F/F, Harrow Nova AU, Harrow Nova is not a happy person, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Intense Self-loathing, Past Child Abuse, Roleswap AU, Suicidal Thoughts, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Dream, Trauma, but she'll get there, serious angst, what could probably be called attempted suicide by Lyctor trial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:07:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26574244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: "In the end, she poisoned Ortus; so it was Harrow Nova who walked out to the shuttle a half-step behind the Daughter of the Ninth, the chain of Samael Novenary wound about her offhand wrist, the black blade of the Ninth at her side."Expansion of the Harrow Nova AU for the People's Tomb discord server fic jam.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: The People's Tomb Discord Fic Jam 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1941952
Comments: 49
Kudos: 252





	A Thousand Teeth, Yours Among Them

**Author's Note:**

> HEED the warnings and tags! Tags are there out of an abundance of caution. This story features intense self-loathing on Harrow's part, lots of wanting to die, and attempted suicide by Lyctor trial. I promise it all ends well. Also depicts past child abuse, somewhat worse than canon-typical.
> 
> The prompt was "dream". It got away from me, but this all started because the AUs were Harrow's dreams in the River. And this fic definitely has a dream in it, so there.
> 
> Title from Hozier's "In A Week".

In the end, she poisoned Ortus. It was not the most honorable way, but it was the easiest, and the well-being of her House demanded it. There was a purple-grey fungus that sometimes grew on snow leeks in the fields nearest the generator exhaust pipes, where Drearburh's noxious crumbling ductwork systems breathed out fetid foulness like the mouth of a corpse newly dead. This mold, ground up together with certain other ingredients, produced a quite mild neurotoxin, and it was disgustingly simple to slip a small dose into Ortus' evening gruel.

She did not kill him -- he had, in his way, behaved honorably enough, expressing loyalty to his post and his House. Only his own dimness had prevented him from understanding that stepping aside in favor of the superior fighter would have been the greater fealty. But when the First House shuttle arrived, Ortus the Ninth was still twitching spasmodically and drooling on the floor with his mother weeping over him. So it was Harrow Nova who walked to that gleaming steel shell a half-step behind the Ninth's Daughter, the chain of Samael Novenary wound about her offhand wrist, the lightless black blade of the Ninth at her side.

The Reverend Mother and Father were heavily veiled on the other side of the landing court, their faces turned aside, murmuring to each other in low voices. Harrow did not look at them. She bore the lash of their inattentive scorn with straight shoulders and proud heart, as she had borne the lash on her naked flesh when the Reverend Father had punished her for stealing Samael Novenary's chain. She welcomed their most breathless hatred, the utmost nadir of their debased contempt, for it would only spur her to prove her true worth to them all. The day was coming -- had come! -- when she would show beyond doubt that she had not stolen the chain; that she was its rightful inheritor. That she was worth to her House what her House had paid.

The Daughter walked evenly to the shuttle without a backwards glance. Harrow was forced to admit to herself, though she would rather have slashed throat and wrists here on the landing pad then say it aloud, that the Daughter looked impressive. She was nearly as tall as the Reverend Father, and much more muscular; this was as she had always been. But her egregious, gaudily red hair had been shaved nearly to the skull, and she wore the heavy black robes well, augmented by a silver-gilded phalange piercing each ear and tight bone gauntlets that seemed to glow in the landing-lights.

Then they were inside, the shuttle door sliding shut behind them with a final _click_. They sat across from each other, Harrow a pit of fear and fury, the Daughter inscrutable behind the _stupid_ smoked glasses she affected to hide her hideous eyes.

The shuttle's engines engaged. They felt almost no physical sensation as the only home they'd ever known, every ash-stained monument and arch browned with ancient blood, every pitted stone slab and unmourned grave, dropped away into the maw of deep space. And they were falling into it, too.

"Harrow," the Daughter said. "You don't have to do this." It was the first time she'd spoken to Harrow in weeks; and now there was nowhere for Harrow to run, no shadowed gallery to duck into at the sound of her approaching voice.

"We have broken orbit," Harrow replied stiffly, with no attempt at respect or proper form of address. That would be harder than any trial awaiting her in the House of the First; she knew she must learn to address the Daughter properly, in company at least. "I cannot return. The disgrace would be unspeakable. I should be immediately killed, and I would deserve it."

"That's not what I meant," the Daughter said, and then she _took off_ her infuriatingly juvenile glasses. Her eyes nearly glowed in the gloom of the shuttle's interior. The effect was awful and tasteless, like a poorly-proportioned skull with cheaply gilded sockets used as a prop in one of Ortus' dreadful pantomimes. Harrow wished very dearly to extinguish those lights with the point of her rapier.

But the Daughter kept them trained on her, hot and hateful. "We can stop somewhere and drop you off. I arranged it with the pilot. Trentham, or Tisis. It's on the way -- hell, we're so far out of the way that _anything_ else is in it. No one would ever have to know -- I swear on the Tomb that your parents would never hear of it from my lips. You could get out."

The pity in her tone made Harrow want to vomit. With all the frigid airlessness of deep space she said, "Do you accuse me of cowardice?"

The Daughter looked genuinely taken aback. A ploy, undoubtedly, to tempt her substituted cavalier into desertion, to get her out of the way.

"What? No! God, Harrow -- you've been miserable for _years_. They tried to kill you down there. I'm offering you your freedom! Don't you want it?"

"What I want," Harrow said slowly, as to an imbecile child, "is to aid you in your quest for Lyctoral glory, and to utterly decimate and destroy any enemies of the Ninth House who oppose you. It is my dearest dream to see all light leave their eyes and dedicate their deaths to the Locked Tomb. I have lived for nothing else."

"Have it your way," said Gideon Nonagesimus, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, rather helplessly.  
  


* * *

  
The Daughter was _useless_. This did not surprise Harrow, but it did distress her. Gideon did not appear to be taking the Lyctoral trials at all seriously. She spent an appalling amount of time _hanging around_ in the atrium, eating whatever the skeletons brought her, content as an animal to wallow in her meals and think of nothing else. Sometimes she even _talked_ to the skeletons, as if they were people!

And she talked incessantly to the other House scions and cavaliers -- especially to the dramatically frail necromancer of the Seventh, whom Harrow hated with a satisfying and uncomplicated heat from the first time she batted her eyelashes at the Ninth's Daughter. Everything about her was a transparent ploy, and of course the Daughter fell for it like an utter simpleton.

Three days in Canaan House, and the Daughter had not asked _once_ for the key ring that Harrow guarded like her own beating heart, kept on a thin black chain around her neck, cold and sharp against her skin. She guarded it all the more bitterly because it did not seem like anyone was going to try to take it from her. She wished they would. She roamed the halls of Canaan House, looking for dangers, finding nothing but skeletons and decaying ancient furniture and gaudily carved doors. She reported the locations of the locked doors back to the Daughter, who looked at her with something horribly like concern and said, "Harrow -- have you slept at all since we got here?"

That was nearly insult enough for Harrow to throttle her, no matter that the Daughter was more than a head taller and considerably stronger, and with necromancy besides. But it was early in the trial yet, too early to be disqualified for killing her necromancer. So she bared her teeth and said, "That's irrelevant."

"No, it's not," Gideon said, but then she looked into Harrow's face and added, "Sex Pal told me about the hatch. We can go down there tomorrow morning, but I want you to sleep first. And eat some of this food, it's -- food, honestly, I don't even need to describe it more than that for it to be better than nutri-paste and Crux's shit gruel." She smiled, which made her look even more vapid than usual. "I can't even imagine what Lyctors eat, but I want to try it."

Harrow ate the food (which was dubious) and laid on the cot in their quarters until she fell into an uneasy sleep. It galled her to have to take direction from an idiot while all the other Houses were no doubt advancing swiftly toward Lyctorhood, but her only other option was desertion, and she had discarded that already. She had borne humiliation before. She could bear it again.

In the winnowing trial, at least, she had purpose. There was even a sharp, exacting pleasure in the flick of her blade, the effortless shear of metal through enchanted bone, the utter mastery of her chosen discipline, before which the Lyctoral construct crumbled into dissipating gas. Of course, the Daughter ruined it by sweeping her into a childishly enthusiastic rib-cracking hug as soon as the door to the chamber opened. "Harrow! That was _incredible_! You turned it into mincemeat! Fuck. Mincebone? Bone filet, anyway. How'd you learn to fight like that?"

Harrow twisted and thrashed until the Daughter put her down, then backed up a few steps, her breath heaving, her skin crawling. "Dedication," she managed to say. "Suffering. More spine than _you_ ever showed."

"Harsh," Gideon said, pretty amiably. She hadn't even broken a blood sweat. Harrow was torn between contempt (pathetic -- she hadn't even been trying!) and awe (what other necromancer could have mastered such a strange new skill so easily?). "Well, come on, I think we've earned a good dinner."

"You are a hog," Harrow snarled, but she took the key the Daughter handed her and clipped it onto the keyring.

For the rest of the evening she suffered from a strange malady; a heavy, warm, sluggish feeling. It was a sense that something that had always been a gaping pit within her was missing, that a starving howl she had been hearing as long and as steadily as the beat of her own heart had been silenced. Yet it was not hunger; she actually ate half of what the skeletons in the atrium put before her, so that the Daughter beamed at her, and Harrow hardly even wanted to punch her for it.

It took a long while laying in the dark, on the cavalier cot at the foot of the Daughter's bed, listening to her snore, for Harrow to feel the added weight of the new key over her heart and realize that what she was feeling was _satisfied_.

She decided that she did not like it. It bred complacency. Thank the King Undying and the beast He had buried forever, when she woke in the morning she felt like herself again.

* * *

Naberius Tern was agile, precise, and incredibly well-trained. Harrow Nova was agile, precise, well-trained, and more unhinged than anyone from a civilized planet with dinner parties and hair gel could have aspired to be. When he flared his trident knife in a tricky move that pinned her rapier but brought his hand close to her face, she bit him. Anticipating that he'd be used to that -- she'd seen his Princesses gnawing on him -- Harrow drove her booted foot down with all her strength at a calculated oblique angle into the flare of the lateral malleolus, just at the joint of his left ankle. She felt the tendon part from bone; the onlookers only heard the crunch and saw Tern's face flush, heard his howl reverberate weirdly in that room of mirrors.

Hands grabbed her from behind, hauled her off the wailing Third cavalier. Instinctively she lashed down and back with Samael’s chain, felt it crack against bone.

“Aaauuurhgghh _fuck_!” yelled the Daughter of the Ninth. “That’s fine, I wasn’t using my fibula! Harrow, stand _down_!”

She stilled every muscle at once as though she had instantly ossified, with only her heart stuttering at full shuttle-engine speed to testify that she lived. There was a great deal of shouting, but she heeded none of it. She waited only to hear what her penance would be for maiming her necromancer.

"-- only a training bout --"

"-- flagrant, willful malice --"

"-- broke my _fucking_ ankle, the little demon! It was clavicle to _sacrum_ \-- "

"The Third House demands compensation!"

That was Coronabeth Tridentarius, rising from her injured cavalier's side like a phoenix, beautiful enough in her vengeful fury to penetrate even Harrow's insensate dread, like the rays of Dominicus through a layer of choking cloud.

Gideon's hands were still wrapped around Harrow's forearms, though loosely now since she'd stopped struggling. Harrow marveled that Gideon was still standing with a broken fibula, and she shifted her weight minutely so that her necromancer could lean on her in place of the bad leg. It would shame the Ninth House if she fell, or showed weakness in this moment of decision.

"Corona. Fuck," Gideon said, and Harrow could hear the tremors of pain in her voice, though she bore it well. "I offer apology --" and she stopped.

Harrow waited. The whole room waited, focused now entirely on the Ninth; the Second tight-lipped and disapproving, the Fifth horrified, the Third still on the floor being needled and coddled by his paler Princess while the bright one rose to his defense. The Fourth watched from the corner with her eyes looking about ready to bulge out of her head and roll across the floor. 

It was fitting that representatives from nearly every House would bear witness to Harrow's final debasement and disgrace. She waited serenely for the killing stroke of Gideon's disavowal that would sever her from the Ninth entirely, and hopefully save it from her contamination, like the amputation of a gangrenous limb.

Gideon let out a long breath and said, with great deliberation, "I offer apology to the Third House that your cavalier is such a whiny butt-faced hair gel addict who doesn't know what 'to the floor' means. That must be very difficult for you."

The room erupted again. Coronabeth advanced on the Ninth House, hands half-raised and clenched into fists as though she intended to take revenge for her wounded cavalier herself. Harrow tightened her grip on Samael's chain, but -- to her greater horror than anything that had happened in the practice room so far -- Gideon pulled Harrow back and stepped forward, placing _herself_ between her cavalier and the scion of the Third. She was _laughing_. Coronabeth snarled something low, of which Harrow caught only the word _defenseless_. Gideon said, "She broke it, I'll fix it, since I'm sure as hell not buying it," and limped forward to kneel beside the sulking Naberius.

Something about her caught Harrow's eye as she moved. The leg Harrow had fractured was glowing, rippling with a sort of white coruscation like the reflection of a bright tungsten-filament light over disturbed water. It wasn't glaringly obvious, and in the uproar it was possible that some of the others had missed it, but Harrow missed nothing. Certainly not when it came to her necromancer.

Then Gideon gripped Naberius' broken ankle and the same thing began happening around her hands, spilling over into his flesh with the probing hesitancy of a tongue investigating a rotten tooth. Then it seemed to gain strength and certainty, and settled all in a rush into the soft tissue of the ankle where it gleamed like silver dusted over his pale skin, then slowly faded.

The room was so silent that you could practically hear the soft, unpleasant sounds of rearranging tendon and bone. 

After the light had been fully absorbed, Ianthe Tridentarius placed her own hand on Naberius' ankle, which had un-swelled to its ordinary size. In her soft, overripe voice, she said, "Well. That's _very_ interesting. Guess we won't have to turn you into glue quite yet, Babs."

There was more noise and fuss after that, though not quite so much shouting. Harrow waited at the edges of it for her necromancer, who came over finally with her ordinary swinging gait, though the shine had not quite fully died out of her lower leg. The sight of it disturbed Harrow deeply in a way she could not quite identify, as though it tugged on the merest thread of something buried deep in the barren sod packed over the ossuary full of underdeveloped skeletons that formed the foundation of her soul.

"Don't look like that. He deserved it," Gideon said, grinning at her as though she had not nearly gotten their House and their chances at Lyctorhood obliterated in an inter-House war that had only been diverted by Gideon's own necromancy, which was unlike any necromancy Harrow had ever seen.

But questioning her would have been impossibly crass, and disrespectful at that, which was hardly the appropriate response to having been spared disavowal or even retaliatory injury. Stiffly, Harrow said, "Yes, he is an ass. I'd have expected better from the Third," and followed her necromancer (wearyingly, predictably) to dinner.

* * *

"No," Gideon said flatly.

With perfect conviction Harrow said, "We must."

"I won't do it and you can't make me."

At that Harrow's anger began to crack the tomb she had built for it in the pit of her chest. "God, I wish I could! Don't you understand? This is the path! If you fail in this, then I fail, and my failure is _not acceptable_!"

"Sextus wouldn't do it," Gideon countered. "Why'd he refuse? I know, it's because he's a perfect moron over Camilla the Sixth, and I'm sure he used his turbo-brain to figure out that something godawful would happen to her if he went through with it, which means something godawful's going to happen to _you_ if _I_ go through with it. Your brain will probably squirt out your nose, and then not only will you be dead but Sextus will get to lecture me for the next ten years on how I turned my cavalier's brain into nutri-paste chunks because I wasn't good enough at math --"

" _Gideon_!" Harrow cried, which shut her up, at least. "This is not a _joke_! Septimus has already figured out the theorems, and if you're right then Sextus has too. If we don't take her up on this she'll keep asking until someone does. Do you even _want_ to become a Lyctor? Don't you understand what this _means_?" Harrow was trembling; she couldn't stop herself. Ever since the fight with Naberius there had been a sort of keening pain beneath her breastbone. It was worse when she looked at Gideon, and so far the only thing that had been able to soothe it had been adrenaline, the rush of fighting, the frenzy of self-sacrifice. She felt as though there was a stain on her soul, a scar that kept welling up with fresh acid and bile, and this might finally be the key to scrubbing it clean.

She said, "If you don't go into that field, I will. Maybe you can use your -- necromantic ability to keep me alive, or maybe you can't. But we cannot walk away from this."

Gideon looked down at her. Without realizing what she was doing Harrow had grabbed two fistfuls of the Ninth Daughter's black vestments and was all but hanging off her. It was ridiculous, but Gideon only looked deeply distressed. "It'll hurt," she said, further proving her complete idiocy and lack of suitability for anything Canaan House demanded of her. For a moment Harrow choked on a resurgence of the old black hatred that she had nearly forgotten about since Drearburh -- the hatred of Gideon as a cuckoo's egg, an addled viper, a weakling who had stolen her seat in the heart of the Reverend Family without the backbone to carry out the least of its duties.

"My life is an open wound," Harrow spat. "At least let me suffer in service of my House."

Gideon was pale now, but something like resolution was in her eyes. "All right," she said. “If that’s what you really want.”

She led Harrow back into the test chamber, each step taken with extreme reluctance, as though hoping Harrow would recant and call the whole thing off. Harrow was silent. They crossed the line of the Seventh’s necromantic seal back to where Dulcinea waited, prettily arranged with her crutches against the tile wall, like a still painting of a trellised flower. Her innocent pose convinced Harrow that she'd been listening to the Ninth's argument, but she hid it well.

Harrow sat cross-legged on the cold metal floor and prepared herself for pain. Gideon spoke briefly to Dulcinea, then glanced back once at Harrow -- Harrow avoided her eyes -- and stepped across the painted line into the entropy field.

The pain was worse than she could have possibly imagined. She threw herself into it, knowing that underneath it was ecstasy, was relief. Her spine writhed with red-hot filaments, then white-hot, then into a spectrum of heat known only to the fusion chambers in the hearts of stars; her organs deliquesced, and she felt each one shred itself in an agony of minute detail, layer by layer; her body turned on her, every cell a vicious revenant, and ripped her to dust and thence to atoms. She was screaming. She heard the high, shrill, uncomprehending wail of a brute animal in pain, until she stopped hearing it and didn't know if it was because her hearing had failed or her voice.

She waited to die.

And she thought, not in words, for words had been stripped away: _Is this enough? Do I suffer now as they suffered? Two hundred of them. One second of pain for each soul -- ten seconds -- a minute --_

Once, she felt something that was not pain. A brief pressure, as of a nudge from a foot or the bottom of a crutch. A voice -- not Gideon's -- said "Children," in a tone of unutterable disgust.

And always she felt Gideon there, her necromancer, the adopted Reverend Daughter of the Ninth. She was a blazing halo of white around Harrow’s greying vision, a burden of solid marble weighing down Harrow’s soul, crushing it effortlessly. Harrow’s soul was rot at the center, rot all the way through, but that would be all done soon. The infirmity would be scourged away in the agony of triumph.

She died. She felt herself die, felt the bonds between flesh and spirit come loose, felt her heart stutter to a stop and refuse to beat again. The drag of her useless lungs became the drag of a greater current, and the River was rising to swallow her.

"Harrow!"

She had a brief, vivid hallucination then, as those dying traumatic deaths often did. She imagined Gideon, naked as the day she was spawned. An odd jumble of images: Gideon's hands cupping her face, the veins visible on the underside of her wrists. The perfect musculature Harrow's idiot hindbrain imagined she'd been hiding under her robes all these years. Breasts which were, some part of Harrow was now finally forced to admit, truly impressive. It was a good thing she was dead, she reflected, otherwise she might be forced to acknowledge that Gideon was _attractive_ , which was absolutely out of the question. 

And her eyes -- there were tears in her golden eyes, and Harrow was surprised at the pang of regret she felt for that. But it would all be for the best. Gideon could become a Lyctor, and renew the Ninth. The price would be paid.

 _You don't owe me… there is no debt_ \--

A blaze of white, hideous and unendurable. And, strangely, the sinus-scouring, unmistakable smell of lemons. 

Harrow fell forward into that devouring light, and thought that dying really had not been anything like she expected.

* * *

She woke in familiar darkness. It took her a long time to accept what her eyes told her, when she mustered the strength to open them, but the sight was unmistakable: she was looking up at the low, vaulted, hanging-draped ceiling of the Ninth quarters in Canaan House.

It was impossible, it was beyond belief, but she had lived. Worse: she had dreamed. 

Something about the pain, or the white light, had dredged up the memory she had spent seven years trying to keep buried. She had built a tomb in herself, had weighted that memory with iron and drowned it, had rolled a stone over the mouth of the pool, had chained it with pride and spite and fury, and all her locks had only lasted a pitiful seven years.

She turned her head and saw Gideon, clothed again in her second-best vestments, sitting on the floor with her back to the opposite wall. She had been watching Harrow sleep. She must have been asleep herself -- Harrow could see it in the slackness of her mouth, the slow way she blinked -- but Harrow's waking had woken her, and now she looked worried. 

"How do you feel? Is -- do you think your brain's still working? Say something Harrow-y. Like about the bloody teeth of the unkissed skull, or how I'm an incompetent maggot pretending to be a worm, or something."

Harrow said, "You healed me."

"Well, yeah, you were pretty much roadkill --"

"Not here. Back on the Ninth," Harrow said impatiently. "The night I stole the chain."

She had tried so long to forget, but now she could not help but remember. The night she had defiled the Anastasian monument and retrieved the chain of Samael Novenary, laid claim to her future as a warrior of the Ninth since she could not be its necromancer. She had been caught, and justly punished: made to strip in front of the altar and kneel on the freezing stone as the Reverend Father counted lashes for each sin of treachery she had committed. She was ten years old.

She had welcomed the pain, even then. She didn't know how many lashes the Reverend Father had planned to give her; she thought she remembered seven, but after that her recollection was fractured. 

She did remember knowing the real reason for the punishment. It was not because she had entered some crusty old monument and stolen a relic; if it was that simple, they would have made her put the chain back, or taken it away. She was being punished because they hated her. Because they had hated her since it was finally, unmistakably clear, at age four, that she had no necromantic ability whatsoever. Because she was a living reminder every single day of the broken vow, the traitor's unearned life. Because her parents had paid everything and got nothing in return, and she was that nothing: the void embodied. 

She had known then that they should have killed her. She knew, had always known, that the only reason she lived was to be a plaything for Gideon, their foundling, who at age five showed aptitude for _some_ form of power, even if it was not the traditional Ninth bone magic. Strange power was better than no power. Gideon was better than Harrow. So Gideon was taken into the Reverend Family, and Harrow was cast out into the dark; and they whipped her, and they starved her, and abused her in whatever way they desired, and that was just.

They had all hated her, except Gideon. Gideon had stayed the Reverend Father's hand after seven lashes -- or eight, or nine. Harrow had passed out then. She had awoken, later, no longer kneeling but laid out on her stomach on a folded-up robe. There were hands on her mangled back, but their touch was gentle, and she had not felt any pain. In the edges of her vision, before she passed out again, had been a haze of scintillating white light.

In the gloom of Canaan House Gideon looked at her miserably and said, "He stopped just before you would have bled to death. But your muscles were _shredded_ , all the way down. I didn't know if you'd be able to use your arms again. It was -- I should have stopped him sooner. I tried, but I was just -- frozen. I'm so sorry, Harrow."

Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have so galvanized Harrow. She rolled off the ridiculous cav cot and staggered to her feet. She was astonished by how strong her body was -- as though she had merely woken from sleep, and not from a plunge neck-deep into the River. 

Gideon did not even flinch at her approach. "You're _sorry_?" Harrow cried. "You know what I am, _Nonagesimus_!" She flung the name to hurt, and it hit its mark. Gideon winced. "You know what I cost! I am an abomination. I am a _war crime_. I am the living death of my House, a failure beyond imagining. I should be thrown into Dominicus and my ashes into a black hole, and that still would not eradicate the sin my parents committed in my name. My only hope for any kind of honor is to die for my House as my House died for me -- and _you won't let me_!"

She stood in the center of the room, trembling, hands bloody from her nails ripping into the skin of her palms. She wanted her sword and chain. She wanted Gideon to stand up and fight her, to win. She wanted to go back to that night, to the cold narthex before the black altar, and shake eleven-year-old Gideon until she came to her senses and left ten-year-old Harrow there on the floor --

Gideon said, "It's not your fault that you're not a necromancer."

Harrow stared at her in blank incomprehension. "I am the lost wager of two hundred souls. You know exactly --"

Now Gideon did stand. "It's _not your fault_ , Harrow! You didn't deserve what they did to you, any of it! You don't deserve the shit you do to _yourself_! And I let it happen, all of it. If you're a failure, so am I. And you're right, I won't let you die for some stupid dream of Ninth honor. God, you want to throw away your life for what, for _Crux_? For the mummies in the oss? For the Locked Tomb that no one's been in, that could be empty for all we know?"

"Yes," Harrow said, with all the dignity she could muster, all the dignity of the line to which she could not lay true claim.

Gideon's eyes blazed in the gloom. "Well, that's just tough shit. None of that is worth your life. None of it is worth a drop of your blood or a second of your pain. None of this is your _fault_ , Harrow."

Harrow hit her then. Lacking weapons, she launched herself at the Daughter with bare, bloodied fists, and elbows sharp as rapiers, and her teeth, and her hatred. They scuffled in near-silence, in near-darkness, in a vaulted stone chamber before the empty sockets of decorative skulls; the last two daughters of the Ninth in a brutal war that would have made that House's black heart proud. It ended with both of them bruised and smeared with blood -- mostly Harrow's -- but Gideon, with her greater height and strength, managed to get both arms around Harrow and pull her in close, where she couldn't reach anything vital with nails or teeth. Kicking Gideon in the shins and trying to knee her in the gut got tiring, and Gideon showed no signs either of loosening her grip or of tightening it enough to snap Harrow's spine. 

The silence was loud with their panting breath.

"I don't understand," Harrow said at last, her voice treacherously weak. "Why you were always so -- damnably kind to me. It was worse than anything they did."

"I'm sorry," Gideon said quietly. Her skin was hot and smelled like sweat and blood, and also very faintly like the citrus tang of her odd necromancy, and like the dusty-book smell that clung to her robes, that Harrow had always associated with those inner libraries where the Family lived and she was not welcome. Gideon said, "Harrow, I'm so fucking sorry. I took your life and your parents from you and I didn't understand why. But I do now. We won't go back, when this is over. We'll go somewhere else -- anywhere else. Let the Ninth get what it paid for. It doesn't mean you're the one who has to pay it."

"I --" Harrow began, meaning to say _I can't_ , but the words stuck in her throat.

"Yes, you can," Gideon said fiercely. "You're my cavalier, aren't you? You go where I go."

The tears started then, hot and prickling at the corners of her eyes, but Harrow couldn't even bring herself to will them to stop. "I'm not worthy to --"

"Shut up! I don't care," Gideon interrupted. "I'm a terrible necromancer -- don't look at me like that, it's true, you used to tell me all the time, bones hate me -- and you can be my terrible cavalier. And as long as I don't take a dive into the River, you can't either, or you'll break that oath too, which would be pretty shitty of you after all this garbage speechifying about the honor of the Ninth."

Dazed as though by a blow to the skull, Harrow let her head fall forward, her forehead pressed to the shoulder of Gideon's robe. The arms around her had relaxed into something approximating what she imagined was a normal embrace. Numbly she said, "I never swore the oath. Ortus did."

"I don't know, I felt pretty oathed when you broke Babs' foot," Gideon said, and by God there was actual _admiration_ in her voice. "But okay, we'll do it right. Harrow, I swear to annoy the shit out of you constantly, and paint my face wrong on purpose to make you fix it, and remind you how _fucking terrible_ the Ninth is every time you feel like feeding it your soul. Now you go."

Harrow's mouth moved soundlessly for a good fifteen seconds before she managed, "That is _not_ the oath."

"Damn, you're right, almost forgot," Gideon said, and she tilted Harrow's chin up with two fingers. Infinitely gentle, she pressed her lips to the place where Harrow's nose met the bones of her frontal sinus. The noise Harrow made embarrassed them both.

"One flesh, one end," Gideon said, strained and a little breathless. "Say it, loser."

Something in Harrow was shattered, like she had been looking at life through a pane of black glass since she'd been four, and it had suddenly split under a titanic blow. Her head felt very heavy, her heart sore but oddly light. "One flesh, one end," she said, with the inevitability of the tomb.

"You can come up with the rest later." Gideon sat down again with her back to the wall, and tugged Harrow down with her. Harrow let herself be tugged, and let herself be folded against Gideon's side, encircled in Gideon's arms. 

It was…nice. 

It made her skin crawl, to experience what was not painful, to seek warmth and safety that would be eternally, rightfully denied. But perhaps there was a way she could learn how to seek it. Gideon seemed so confident; maybe she could teach her.

She said, almost as an afterthought, "This is the third time I owe you my life."

As she had seven years ago in response to Harrow's delirious ravings on the floor of the narthex, Gideon said, "You don't owe me, Harrow. There is no debt."

A nice thought. Exhausted after all from her death and resurrection, Harrow Nova fell asleep leaning against her necromancer and dreamed of nothing at all.

* * *

After the trials of Canaan House, driving a sword through the Lyctor’s heart was easy as drawing breath, and joyful as a song. 

The gruesome regenerating construct crumbled before Gideon’s clumsy bursts of light, like a bacterial colony falling apart under a strobing of hard radiation. Harrow danced with its flailing tendrils as though she were at a ball on the Third, mannerly and vicious. And always Gideon was there in the back of her mind, guiding her blade to the most fiendishly difficult targets, and enlivening the battlefield with such eminently helpful commentary as “Hah! Good one, she’s really mincebone now,” and “Watch out for the -- yeah, kill it!” and more variations of _fuck_ than Harrow had ever had the time to imagine, and some truly terrible puns that she did not dignify with a response.

When the final blow came, it was perfect as if they had planned it advance; a clean thrust through the breastbone and into the ventricles with the black blade of the Ninth, that thirsted for blood as it devoured light. The fulminating boil that Palamedes Sextus had planted in Cytherea’s lungs, undermined by the dreadful wounds inflicted by Camilla’s swords, burst open like a flower of death and vomited up its purulent contents along with the life that it had preyed on parasitically for the last ten thousand years. 

The Lyctor rolled belly-up and died. Her flesh healed over and around the blade, but she did not move again. 

Harrow was still trying to free the rapier when Gideon reached her and whirled her around, sweeping her up into a wildly exuberant hug. Harrow tolerated this patiently, and even refrained from murdering Magnus Quinn when he jogged up to join them with a beaming grin and a cry of “Ah, young love!” Gideon had only resurrected him a few hours ago, and he had fought much better when pressed to it than he ever had on the practice floor; for these reasons she was willing to spare him on the first offense. 

“Help me with this,” she said to him, thinking that he could cut her sword free with his own.

But Gideon shook her head and pulled Harrow away, drawing Magnus after. “Leave it. There are other, better swords out there. I bet we can find a whole planet that’s nothing but swords. That would be _rad_.”

Harrow cast one last look over her shoulder at the proud black pommel, protruding like a Cohort standard out of the Lyctor’s ruined body; then she turned away, towards Gideon’s shout. Camilla Hect lay crumpled against a ruined fragment of wall, clutching a spear of interlocking teeth that had gone clean through her shoulder. Gideon called, “Harrow! Help me with this,” and while Harrow yanked the spear out like pulling a rotten tooth, Gideon clapped her hands over Camilla’s carotid arteries and flooded them with that lemon-scented light. 

Camilla gasped, choked, and opened her eyes. She looked first at Harrow, standing over her with bloodied tooth-harpoon in hand; then at Gideon. “The Warden,” she croaked. “Is he --”

“In pieces,” Harrow said briskly. Gideon gave her an aggrieved look, which she ignored. 

Camilla’s mouth twisted, but she did not otherwise react. Gideon said, “We’ll find him, before we go. I think with enough of him I might be able to get him back.”

That gruesome search completed, they made their way down to the lowest outdoor terrace, a broad swath of scorched marble that was relatively uncracked. The Second waited for them there, Dyas anxiously scanning the sky with one hand on her rapier, Deutoros engrossed in a tiny handheld screen. “There’s someone coming,” she said by way of _greetings_ and _congratulations on killing an immortal Lyctor_. “Not the Emperor -- the ship has no callsign. Someone else.”

“Good. Because I, personally, vote that we throw out the entire Emperor, if that’s what his Lyctors are like,” Gideon declared. She was still giddy with victory, and seemed punch-drunk from the resurrection of the Fifth and Fourth, who were celebrating their own private reunion a little ways down the terrace. She threw her arms out expansively, and would have toppled over if Harrow hadn’t given her a hard but unobtrusive shove as a counterbalance. “I am sick of this planet. I am sick of all these planets. I want to see the universe.”

“The universe is a war zone,” Deutoros snapped.

“Good thing I’m allergic to dying,” Gideon responded, wiggling what she absolutely refused to stop calling her ‘magic fingers’. “Do we have everybody?”

“No word from the Third, or the Eighth. They must have taken shelter somewhere else in the structure. Discounting the Seventh -- everyone is accounted for.” Deuteros lowered her device and shared an unreadable glance with her cavalier. “Nonagesimus,” she said, as though the word left a sour taste in her mouth. “As thanks for saving Lieutenant Dyas, I will ignore what happens in the next fifteen minutes, and refrain from mentioning this ship to the Cohort in my report. I do not know who they are, only that they are likely to be dangerous. Anyone operating outside of the Emperor’s auspices --”

“Noted, thank you, Captain,” Harrow said sharply. 

Gideon turned to her with a grin that outshone Dominicus. “Let’s ditch this corpse stand. Come see the universe with me, my osseous savior. My bonelicious bodyguard.”

“We’re bound by oath. You don’t have to _persuade_ me,” Harrow said, with just the right note of irritability. 

“My penumbral protectress,” Gideon continued with unalloyed enthusiasm. Her lips were forming around the words _calcified cavalier_ when Harrow yanked her head down by a fistful of robe and kissed her. It was in self-defense, really.

A less-than-discreet cough from the Second broke them apart. “Time is a factor,” Dyas said, not unkindly. 

The strange ship was a falling star through the sacred atmosphere of the First. They watched it grow larger and closer until it grew too bright to look at. Then Harrow looked at Gideon, who was looking almost longingly over her shoulder at the Fifth and the Fourth, all tangled up in each others’ arms, at least three of them crying. Harrow did have to admit it made a charming, if nauseatingly quaint family picture. 

“We will see the other Houses safe home,” Dyas said, and this time her voice was downright warm. “You have our word.”

The ship was getting close enough now that they could make out its stubby un-Imperial shape through the flickering, fading halo of re-entry. A pair of sharp excited shrieks indicated that it had finally caught the attention of the Fourth teens, which meant they had better hurry if they wanted to be first aboard, which they did. Harrow had no intention of shepherding a pair of wide-eyed adolescents around the universe. Gideon would be bad enough. Gideon would be terrible.

Gideon took her hand and kissed the back of it. “That’s our ride, my shadowy champion.”

Camilla joined them, with her indelible heart in a bag of bone fragments tucked safely under her arm, and they walked out into the light.


End file.
